Amanda Seyfried has been stepping outside the proverbial box recently with her roles in films. The last time we caught up with the "Mean Girls" and "Mamma Mia!" star, she was fighting the Man with [article id="1673365"]Justin Timberlake in the sci-fi thriller "In Time,"[/article] and this week, she has us on the edge of our seats in the suspense thriller "Gone."

The film revolves around recent kidnapping victim Jill Parrish (Seyfried), who is still trying to get over a series of harrowing, inexplicable events that occurred a year earlier, when she claimed she was kidnapped and buried in a hole in a ground. When Jill comes home from work one evening to find her sister missing, she is convinced that the same kidnapper has returned to torture her once more.

Unfortunately for Jill, the people around her think she's crazy, including the local police, and Jill has to take matters into her own hands to try to find her sister before something truly terrible happens. The story is told in such a way to keep the audience wondering if Seyfried's character is really crazy and if the one police officer who believes her is actually the killer.

When MTV News caught up with Seyfried recently, she revealed that she enjoys playing up the paranoid aspects of a femme fatale, but also explained exactly why Jill isn't your run-of-the-mill damsel in distress.

"She's just the girl-next-door kind of character, and it kind of makes you realize that anyone is capable of anything if they put their mind to it," Seyfried said. "She has no choice but to go in the direction of the serial killer, because he has her sister, and it's a no-holds-barred really strong female character."